Studying a History play? Look for the playwright’s sources …
My Marxist critical inclinations – that a text can’t be read in isolation from the contextual crucible that created it – get pretty much free reign when it comes to teaching Edward II. For the OCR A Level course, my students need to compare Marlowe’s drama to Tennyson‘s monodrama, ‘Maud‘ and, get this, 50% of the mark is context (that’s AO3, troops).
What, exactly, is context? I’d suggest that for both texts, maybe all texts, context is usually a mix of two things:
What, exactly, is a text?
As the school year commences, for teachers if not students, welcome to the first page of my main copy of Marlowe‘s Edward II. [a]
Why am I showing you this?
Continue reading “Quotation of the Week (#55): 03 September 2018”
Buying books is what we do … sometimes we even read them!
Ouch – where did those six weeks go, then?
I vividly remember sitting in a pub on the last day of term, almost too exhausted to take in the fact that we were finally finished. That seems like about 10 days ago. The rest has passed in a blur of walking (with blisters you wouldn’t believe); sleeping under canvas at every opportunity (I reckon upwards of two weeks); sleeping in general (storing up resources for next term and dealing with the futility of trying not to dream about school); writing resources for school and this blog; reading; and buying books …
At £20+, you need a real connection to the play to get your money’s worth.
Kirk Melnikoff (ed.), Edward II: A Critical Reader (Arden Early Modern Drama Guides), (Bloomsbury Publishing: London, 2017)
This is my first taste of the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides series; my overall impression was a positive one.
Continue reading “(book review) Melnikoff: Edward II – A Critical Reader”
An excellent addition to college / uni library shelves. Less sure about your personal collection …
Brinda Charry, The Arden Guide to Renaissance Drama: An Introduction with Primary Sources (Arden Shakespeare) (Bloomsbury Publishing, London: 2017) £18.99 (paperback)
Renaissance plays are among the world’s most valuable literary artifacts. They are also historical documents, ideological statements, philosophical reflections and theatrical scripts.
Brinda Charry has produced a relatively accessible and comprehensive overview of the period and its drama, split into two distinct sections.
Continue reading “Charry: Arden Guide to Renaissance Drama (review)”
Thankfully, we can’t have a third series of The Hollow Crown, but what about adaptations of the Roman plays?
If there’s one thing my (currently stuttering) Pony Tail Shakespeare read-through project has given me so far, it’s a greater love for the History Plays. Once the project is (eventually) finished, I’m looking forward to reading them again merely for pleasure.
Continue reading “Quotation* of the Week: 13 August 2018 (#53)”
Gifted, abominable, yet capable of producing ‘the mighty line’ …
It’s episode 52 – not a continuous year (the first post is here), but a year nonetheless, so I’m going to indulge myself a little this week. Will you be able to tell the difference, I hear you ask!
Bear with me whilst I tell you a story:
In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages. His story will be told here. His name was Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and if his name – in contrast to the names of other gifted abominations, de Sade’s, for instance, or Saint-Just’s, Fouché’s, Bonaparte’s, etc. – has been forgotten today, it is certainly not because Grenouille fell short of those more famous blackguards when it came to arrogance, misanthropy, immorality, or, more succinctly, wickedness, but because his gifts and his sole ambition were restricted to a domain that leaves no traces in history: to the fleeting realm of scent. [a]
Marlowe probably DID make a hazard of his head by easing his heart …
The more I read about Marlowe, the more I like and sympathise with him – arrogant, frustrated genius, malcontent, morally questionable, and attention-whore as he may have been. I sense a kindred spirit: my best friend would say the same about me – perhaps with a lot more arrogance and a lot less genius. As I get older, I like to think that my moral code is finally begining to crystallise, where it was entirely fluid 25 years ago, but then Marlowe never had the opportunity to mellow …
Increasingly, I see Marlowe as the kind of ‘mis-shape‘ Jarvis Cocker sung about in 1995:
Hot ice and wondrous strange snow: the appetite for articulation …
Why then?
Conveniently, it’s as close as we can get to dating both Richard III and Edward II, my Key Stage 5 texts. The other plays I teach at the moment – Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth – follow on from here.
This period was a crucible in which Drama as we know it was being born, alchemically transmuted from the didactic Morality Plays into something fresh and exciting. With my Marxist critical hat on, if we can understand the contextual elements poured into that cauldron, we can better appreciate and analyse the resultant heady brew.
Love it, hate it? Just try it, and see what happens …
Stephen Greenblatt: Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power, (Bodley Head: London, 2018). ISBN: 9781847925046.
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I probably need to declare my bias, not least for new visitors.
I’m an unashamed socialist (I don’t understand how an educator could be otherwise, given that our efforts benefit society more than ourselves); I’m anti-Brexit in the UK, and anti-Trump in the US. One of my most popular blog posts, from two years ago, equated Richard III with Trump. “I am unfit for state and majesty” indeed …
Continue reading “Greenblatt: Tyrant – Shakespeare on Power (review)”
The Boar's Head, Eastcheap 